The theatre district in downtown Cleveland was built shortly after the turn of the last century, largely for touring acts and productions, much in the manner of its current functioning, although within a very different theatere economy. (Aside from the commercial tours bussed in, there's only the explicitly "experimental" house across the river, which would need to be the subject of a separate line of thought.)
My conservatory, which is apparently well regarded by people who for some reason are able to rank artistic conservatories, has relocated from its old home some distance from downtown to this cluster of theatres. But my training happened in a very different place. Two places, actually. The first was the university, still very much in the spirit of its small-college land-grant turn-of-the-century aesthetic. (The movement and dance classes were in the old gymnasium, and the theatre performances and classes were across the large street, in the college since merged with the old land-grant college, in a remodeled social hall that dated from the founding. Even this isn't there anymore, as both programs have moved across campus to new facilities.) The second was the play house (sic) itself, built at roughly the same time, in the spirit of the American regional theatre movement, and some of the early workers in that movement, now approaching their senescence, had been drafted in to launch the conservatory degree. The original structure was a small theatre built for Ibsen and Shakespeare, partially connected to the Little Theatre movement of the time. The prosperity of the beginning of the 20th century brought a much larger stage next door, taking the same aesthetic to a larger scale, and the prosperity at the end of the century brought the huge, boxy, Phillip-Johnson designed venue that served as the mainstage of the present venue, along with an array of rehearsal halls carved out of the Sears, Roebuck next door.
In a sense, these two place, and the temporal realities nested within them, were the ground of the training, not least because the people who had worked in these realities were the ones structuring the training. But that time in America, the pre-war years, is almost completely hidden from sight now. Any play from before the second world war is siply approached as a "classic," staged in a certain manner because it is right to stage things such as that in that manner, without any sense of what made working in that way so necessary at the time. Imitating the past, as the past, is at best door, and never the mansion itself.
The play house is now a parking lot for a nearby hospital (after having been given over to the local police force to use for tactical training for a few years). I'm unfamiliar with the new setup at the university, as I've not visited the program since they moved. Which is probably best. The reality that has meaning for me, that shapes both the manner of my work and the way in which I think about it, is the schematic that I've just described.
There were difficulties, of course. The Midwest is the Midwest, and it will be the Midwest. (Especially, perhaps, with respect to a large gentleman with a Polish-American last name.) But given the presence of a good number of teachers, and the facilities at hand, I was able to carve out a useful path. And it presently functions, as I suspect it did at the time (and this was possibly the source of some of the difficulties) to populate the theatre as the city understands it. Large rooms that look a certain way, with the non-union tours bussed in on commercial contracts from New York. Things used to be a bit more organic, and I choose that word carefully. An organic form arises within nature and associates multiple forms to a certain end. Where the theatre of the time is living, there is a reason that it takes a certain form. Staging theatre without a connection to that necessity merely builds a scale model of a bodily organ. And, frankly, that's what the professional theatre in America does now, and it's priced sufficiently high that the few who get to see it feel that it must be worthwhile, or they've just wasted several hundred dollars on the evening that the newspapers clearly described as excellent.
To find the present, understand the past in the present. Recollection. Else, the need to recreate the forms of the past will govern the present.